Thursday, October 03, 2013

Dessert Day: Nutella Stuffed Cookies

Today I went to Kirsti's house (ofMelbourne on My Mindfame) for another episode of baking sinfully delicious things. We were both not quite on top of our game, which really just ramped up the silliness factor by about 10.

We decided to make Nutella stuffed chocolate chocolate chip cookies and we adapted a recipe from Rhyme & Ribbons blog (see her post here).

1. In a bowl whip butter, granulated sugar and brown sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add in eggs one at a time, mixing until combined after each addition and adding vanilla in with second egg.

2. Slowly add in dry ingredients (cocoa powder, baking powder and soda, and gluten free flour) and mix just until combined. Stir in chocolate chips. Transfer to an airtight container and refrigerate 2 hours (or be lazy and just cover your bowl in plastic wrap like we did).

3. Meanwhile, line a baking sheet with wax paper and dollop 1 1/2 teaspoon of Nutella at a time onto lined baking sheet into individual little mounds, repeat until you have made 30. Transfer to freezer and freeze 1 hour. We found 1.5 teaspoons to be pretty huge and if we were to make these again, I think we'd freeze smaller spoonfuls.

4. Preheat oven to 350F or 176C degrees. To assemble and bake cookies, remove dough from refrigerator and scoop dough out about 2 Tbsp at a time and shape into balls. (Again, if we were to do this again, I'd use a smaller amount of dough. These cookies are no joke).

5. Remove a Nutella dollop from the freezer at a time and using your thumbs make an indentation in the centre of the dough ball. Take the frozen Nutella and place it in the centre of the indentation, then wrap and press cookie dough around Nutella to cover entirely (so the Nutella doesn't seep out while baking).

Remove from oven. Allow to cool several minutes on baking sheet before transferring to a wire rack to cool.

The original recipe called for pressing a few chocolate chips into the tops of the cookies before baking and we did one tray like that and found that we didn't really like it - but if that's your thing, reserve 1/3 of a cup of chips from step 2 and press them into the cookies before baking them. Then they'll look like this:

While we wanted for the dough to harden up in the fridge, we watched Rock of Ages. The basic take aways were that all men had their nipples out in the 80s, without a smidge of practice one can pole dance, Tom Cruise isn't the worst singer in the world (who knew!?), and people did not wear as much blue eye shadow as I was lead to believe from one of my favourite 80s movies 'Working Girl.'

I also think it would be pretty hilarious if Kirsti and I started dressing up in different decade appropriate attire for Dessert Day - some teased out hair and blue eye shadow seems on tap for our next one don't you think?

Also this recipe makes number 26 on my life list to cook 100 new things.

Oh dear, these look oh so good! My husband will definitely love this. He can finish a jar of Nutella on his own so I'm definitely bookmarking this to try. Thanks for sharing. I did watch Rock of the Ages some time ago and was equally surprised that Tom Cruise can sing especially that song I Want to Know What Love Is. :)